“Well, there’s precious little deduction needed; the thing speaks for itself. Stanworth, for some reason still unknown to us, had cause to fear a man named Prince. To his surprise and terror he chanced to encounter him unexpectedly one morning about a week ago in this neighbourhood, and knew at once that he was in serious danger. He comes home at once, makes a rough draft of a letter, and then writes off to some other person telling him all about it and asking, probably, for help; at the same time expressing his conviction that Prince ought to be locked up.”
“It’s curious,” Alec mused.
“Fishy, you mean? Yes, but we’ve had a suspicion for some time that there was something fishy going on behind the scenes in all this, haven’t we? Not only with regard to the behaviour of the other people in the house, but even possibly in connection with old Stanworth himself. But we’re hot on the trail this time, I think.”
“What’s your plan of campaign?” Alec asked, as they turned into the drive.
“Well, we must make a few discreet inquiries. In fact, our course will be much the same as we contemplated before, except that our field of action has luckily been narrowed down very considerably. Instead of chasing about after some nebulous stranger, we’ve now got a definite goal. We had a pretty good idea of what he looks like before, but now we even know the blighter’s name. Oh, this is going to be too easy.”
“How do you mean—we had a pretty good idea of what he looks like?”
“Well, haven’t we? We know he must be strong, because of what happened in the library; Stanworth was no weakling, remember. Then the size of his footprints shows that he was a large man, probably tall. I can’t tell you the colour of his hair or how many false teeth he’s got; but we’ve got a good working idea of his appearance for all that.”
“But what are you going to do, if you do succeed in finding him? You can’t go up to him and say, ‘Good-afternoon, Mr. Prince. I believe you murdered Mr. Stanworth at two o’clock this morning.’ It—it isn’t done.”
“You leave all that to me,” Roger returned largely. “I’ll think of something to say to him all right.”
“I’m sure you will,” Alec murmured with conviction.